Overview

Civil rights activism in New Deal and World War II Chicago During the “Great Migration” of the 1920s and 1930s, southern African Americans flocked to the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville, the cultural, political, social, and economic hub of African American life in the city, if not the Midwest. The area soon became the epicenter of community activism as workingclass African Americans struggled for equality in housing and employment. In this study, Lionel Kimble Jr. demonstrates how these struggles led to much of the civil rights activism that occurred from 1935 to 1955 in Chicago and shows how this workingclass activism and culture helped to ground the early civil rights movement. Despite the obstacles posed by the Depression, bluecollar African Americans worked with leftist organizations to counter job discrimination and made strong appeals to New Deal allies for access to public housing. With its focus on the role of workingclass African Americans—as opposed to the middleclass leaders who have received the most attention from civil rights historians in the past—A New Deal for Bronzeville makes a significant contribution to the study of civil rights work in the Windy City and enriches our understanding of African American life in midtwentiethcentury Chicago.

Full Product Details

9780809334261

Table of Contents

Reviews

Lionel Kimble Jr. s A New Deal for Bronzeville fills an important and heretofore ignored gap in both American and black Chicago history from the latter part of the Depression through the first decade after World War II. Kimble perceptively focuses on the nexus of intense struggles in housing, employment, and civil rights, all enveloped in the motivations and expectations for change of Chicago s energized black population. On its own to a great extent and often acting in coalitions, this populace, its ranks filled with veterans and wartime skilled and unskilled workers, engaged in an informally structured strategy that produced some remarkable successes for the day despite pervasive racism. Christopher Robert Reed, author of The Depression Comes to the South Side, 1930 1933

Lionel Kimble Jr.'s A New Deal for Bronzeville fills an important and heretofore ignored gap in both American and black Chicago history from the latter part of the Depression through the first decade after World War II. Kimble perceptively focuses on the nexus of intense struggles in housing, employment, and civil rights, all enveloped in the motivations and expectations for change of Chicago's energized black population. On its own to a great extent and often acting in coalitions, this populace, its ranks filled with veterans and wartime skilled and unskilled workers, engaged in an informally structured strategy that produced some remarkable successes for the day despite pervasive racism. --Christopher Robert Reed, author of The Depression Comes to the South Side This book provides a very readable and often insightful exploration of how the New Deal and WW II shaped the African American campaign for economic and social rights in postwar Chicago. --CHOICE

Author Information

Lionel Kimble Jr., an associate professor of history at Chicago State University, is the president of the Chicago Branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. His essays have appeared in the Journal of Illinois History and the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, and he has published chapters in several encyclopedias.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available